There was a lot of weary truth in that statement, as there was in many of his best roles. I don’t want to pretend any intimacy with the man, but I wish I might have achieved it. He was one of the great minimalists among the stars. He very arguably was a cynic, and surely a hard drinker, but he was always a disciplined actor and a shrewd judge of bullshit. On the only other occasion we talked, he had just finished work in Ryan’s Daughter. He was only too happy to tell you why he thought David Lean’s movie was dreadful—too long in Ireland and not much to show for it. He found his greatness elsewhere, in pictures people didn’t pay much attention to, until he wasn’t around to make them anymore, and we found ourselves missing them, and him. He was sui generis, one of the few movie stars who understood that you never wanted to be caught acting until you were on the way home.
A few years later there was In a Lonely Place (1950). It features Bogart as Dixon Steele, a more or less psychopathic screenwriter who may be a murderer (in the book on which the film is based, he is) but has a potentially redemptive love affair with Gloria Grahame, who can also offer him an alibi for the crime. He is, however, an extraordinarily angry man, and his potential for violence sunders their affair and any chance they might have had for “normalcy.” Directed by Nicholas Ray on a knife’s edge (it may be his best film), it offers us Bogart more angry than we have ever seen him. We understand that he is only accidentally (and technically) innocent of the crime; he could as well be guilty. That’s what’s really scary about this dark, tangled movie, which leaves this actor in a radically lonely place for all eternity.
Movies that explore only one emotion—in this case anger—are comparatively rare, but their single-mindedness compels our attention and eventually a sort of perverse sympathy. Poor Dix, we think. The world outside chatters blithely on, but he is trapped forever in his nuttiness. Been down so long it looks like up to him.
Also around this time was Act of Violence (1948), Fred Zinnemann directing. Here we have Van Heflin versus Robert Ryan—the former hiding a wartime secret, the betrayal of his men in a prison camp, the latter determined to have his vengeance for this act. Ryan was an actor who mostly did not get his due but was reliably dour and complex when, often, there was no need to be; he simply couldn’t help himself. Offscreen, he was a gentlemanly fellow (I knew him slightly), very composed and watchful, and never better than he was in this film, which is, I think, one of Zinnemann’s best—sort of a B picture with A aspirations that are fulfilled, not least by Ryan’s limping implacability.
We also need to mention Ryan’s very fine performance in The Set-Up (1949). He’s a boxer who’s supposed to throw a fight and can’t bring himself to do so. The film is a comparative rarity in that its running time precisely matches the narrative time it covers (rather a neat trick). It is directed very efficiently by Robert Wise, and Ryan is, I think, brilliant in it—so glum, so used up. The film comes to a “happy” ending. (At least Ryan’s character does not die, though he logically could have.) Some critics have objected to that. I don’t. It sacrifices no relentlessness to the grim mood it establishes and maintains throughout. It’s clear Ryan is not going to find many triumphs in this life. It is a unique boxing picture in that he is not going to find success playing the violin.
We need, as well, to circle back on Mary Astor, playing a hooker who more or less knows all the picture’s secrets, as she did in most of the hundred or so movies she made. Her name keeps coming up in this conversation, doesn’t it, more so than actresses of more fame? It’s belatedly time to give her the credit she never quite attained in her prolific career.
She’s the perfect lover in Dodsworth, the perfect liar in The Maltese Falcon, the perfect mom in Meet Me in St. Louis and now the perfect whore in Act of Violence. The range represented by these four films perhaps outlines her problem: She was a star with too much range. That is to say, she was an actress who could do pretty much everything, so she just did it, never establishing a reliable persona the audience could count on. Offscreen, some hot correspondence with George S. Kaufman made her seem a bad girl when she was, in fact, merely free-spirited. She’s wonderful in Act of Violence, in a relatively small part that is crucial to the plot’s unfolding. That was her way. She later wrote a cheerful tell-all autobiography and some novels and stayed in work forever. Zinnemann was, I thought, a rather prissy perfectionist a lot of the time—an exception or two to be made in due course—and a case can be made that this taut, modest film is perhaps his best work (though I’m sure he would not have agreed).
Mary Astor was a lovely actress, both passionate and good-natured, and she deserves to be remembered more fondly than she is. As does Act of Violence. It’s a mean-spirited little picture, not easily likable, yet not easily forgettable, either.
In 1945, a film called Rome, Open City was released in Italy and, shortly thereafter, around the world. Directed by Roberto Rossellini, it is a fairly simple story of wartime resistance, in which most of the people we care about in the film eventually endure violent deaths. The most important thing about it is that it was made while the war was still being prosecuted in Italy. It used a number of nonprofessional actors (not including Anna Magnani, who became a major star as a result of this film). You got the sense that much of the film was grabbed on the fly by Rossellini and that its “realism” had an authenticity that had not previously been attained in other films that aspired to that quality. Indeed, “neorealism” became the description of choice for this kind of filmmaking, particularly after it won the Palme d’Or at the next year’s Cannes Film Festival.
Oddly, neorealism as a film form did not travel very well. All of its masterpieces were Italian in origin, and its reign as an important genre was relatively short—from the year of Rome, Open City until roughly 1952, when Umberto D was released. Yet I have a great deal of affection for it. I suppose that’s largely because these films made their way to the art houses of Milwaukee and Madison when I was of an age to appreciate how they were different from the other films on offer.
As I look back on neorealism, I find that, for me, two films stand out in memory—one fairly early in the cycle, one quite late in it, and I’m going to let them stand for all the pleasures that cycle gave me. The first is Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief (there is some confusion about the title), which actually came in at number one in the 1952 Sight and Sound poll. (A decade later it had slipped to seventh, and a decade later it was gone forever.) The second is Umberto D, also from De Sica and rarely on anyone’s best films list—except mine.
The Bicycle Thief tells a very simple story: A wife pawns the family’s bedsheets to get her husband’s bicycle out of hock, and he uses it to get a job posting movie posters around Rome. He is accompanied on his rounds by his son, Bruno. Quite early on, the bicycle is stolen, and the rest of the film is devoted to their attempt to recover it. At the end the pair simply melt back into the crowd.
At the time, there was considerable hoo-ha in America because Bruno takes a pee in the street. You would have thought from some of the response to this innocent moment that the kid had committed a capital crime. Eventually, it was seen as merely a part of the film’s easy naturalism—and as part of its charm. It was a small milestone on the road to accepting some new level of honesty in portraying the reality of ordinary lives on the screen.
That thought does not, however, quite convey the full quality of this film. It is rich in incidents, which, considered separately, don’t amount to much but, taken together, create an extraordinary panorama of ordinary life in our time. At first glance, The Bicycle Thief has an almost thrown-together quality, which it maintains steadfastly and by no means cheerlessly. It only slowly begins to show us a relationship between father (Lamberto Maggiorani) and son (Enzo Staiola)—both nonprofessional actors, I believe—as rather casually developed in the script by Cesare Zavattini (and a boatload of collaborators), that is probably more delicately and thoroughly explored than any in the history of film. The sheer number of people who cont
ributed creatively to this movie poses perhaps the greatest challenge to the “one man, one film” theory of how to make a great movie. Sometimes, it really takes a village.
Umberto D is more simple in structure than Thief. A retired professor is living on an inadequate pension, his sole companion a winsome though not particularly attractive dog named Flike. He is a burden on Umberto (played brilliantly by Carlo Battisti), who keeps trying to lose him—except that he can’t be lost for long. The main suspense of the movie derives from the eventual loss of Flike (the professor fears the pound and euthanasia). The main joy of the film derives from Flike’s recovery and Umberto’s acceptance of the fact that the joyous little creature is his for life.
It doesn’t sound like much, but it is among the most heartbreaking movies ever made. Very simply, it says, I guess, that we do not choose what or whom we love, that somehow the object of our affection chooses us—and we reject that choice at our peril. Umberto cannot, in the end, reject Flike’s love. Nothing much changes in his life, which remains at best marginal. But there is redemption in his acceptance of the dog’s love. The ending leaves us awash in sentiment. This deal is for life, which we understand is probably nasty, brutish and short—but better than nothing.
I lose all critical perspective when I am in the presence of this film, so desperately do I want it to be true and not a sentimental fairy tale, which it doubtless is. Sometimes you have to will belief in a movie. Umberto D is for me such a movie. And the great, monumental trick of it is that the stern realism of its style seems to guarantee the truth of the tale. Umberto and Flike are for me immortal signs that the better angels of our natures are real—if, naturally, extremely rare.
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The Best Years
We come now—reluctantly in my case—to The Best Years of Our Lives. It is, of course, about veterans coming home at the end of World War II and their problems adjusting to the postwar world. It’s about Dana Andrews, a bombardier on a bomber during the war, returning to civilian life as a soda jerk and to a marriage with Virginia Mayo, in which he’s just a jerk. (Never mind—Teresa Wright is just around the corner.) It’s about Fredric March being, oxymoronically, a liberal-minded banker. It’s about Harold Russell having hooks instead of hands, and trying to force Cathy O’Donnell away from his damaged self.
It was written by Robert Sherwood, directed by William Wyler and produced by Samuel Goldwyn, in 1946. It was the last outcry of wartime liberalism—expressing the sense that we had fought a good war for a better world, which would now arrive on schedule, despite the hardships endured. It was a huge and beloved success. It comforted people—everything would be okay now—and ignored the issues and conflicts that actually marked the postwar world. For example, it never mentions the great issue of postwar America, our struggle with racism. Or, for that matter, McCarthyism. Or anything else that really disturbed us. Mostly the movie is about sorting out a variety of love affairs—the right man with the right woman.
We don’t often care to test likable films against historical reality. But Best Years, as I had occasion to discover, elicits a defensive passion that is quite remarkable. Its fans cannot bear to accept that mostly things did not work out the way the film confidently insisted they would. Credit the filmmaker with good intentions. But if you return to the film now, it is in my estimation close to travesty.
There is, though, one sequence in the picture that is authentically great. Dana Andrews is in a field full of parked and disarmed bombers—war’s grim detritus—that seems to stretch for miles. He climbs into one of the planes, seats himself in the bombardier’s seat in the nose of the B-17 and recollects, with the help of sound effects, the days when he was a pilot—the heroic past—and forgets the reality of being a soda jerk, while imagining a better future. It is a long, lovely moment, beautifully realized by Wyler, and by Andrews. It is at the heart of the picture’s optimism. It achieves the greatness the rest of the picture aspires to.
As of 1945, ninety million people went to the movies every week, the largest number since 1929. As of 1950 that number had dropped to sixty million. By 1980 it had fallen to around twenty million, give or take, where it has more or less hovered ever since. The reason, of course, was television. Once you bought a set and paid your electric bill, it was essentially free. Social commentators seriously debated whether the movies had a future. A couple of studios went out of business. All of them truncated production, and long-term contracts with talent virtually ceased. It would not be until the 1980s that the business stabilized on the much more modest scale that still pertains. Movies for me, by and large, then became less entertaining, though not at first. It required a few years for them to decline naturally.
Genres largely ruled routine production during this period. It was a great age of science fiction and westerns, very few of them immortal works, but many of them entertaining, inexpensive and well made. “Serious” filmmaking focused, to a surprising degree, on political and quasi-political topics (Crossfire, The Killers, Criss Cross, Cry of the City) as well as social problems—mental illness (The Snake Pit), alcoholism (The Lost Weekend) and, of course, racism in many of its aspects (Home of the Brave, Lost Boundaries, Intruder in the Dust and Pinky among others). These movies tended to be soberly reviewed and earnestly discussed, though they have not worn well over time. I would not willingly seek out any of them today.
It may be that the quintessential filmmaker of the era was Stanley Kramer, earnest and inept, making politically correct, totally leaden movies on “important” subjects and, upon his death, receiving front-page coverage and a full inside page in the New York Times—twice the coverage (as David Thomson has pointed out) accorded Robert Bresson on his passing. He survived many a bad review and many a box office disaster, and it is hard to think of a movie, other than perhaps The Caine Mutiny, that one would now encounter with anything less than dismay—and he only produced that. He, among many, was a master of demographics: He made movies for the liberal-minded, people who cherished political correctness over such aesthetic values as the movies rather carelessly—certainly unprogrammatically—promoted. Please don’t guess who’s coming to dinner—you already know anyway.
Whatever was happening, commercially speaking, to the American movie in the years between 1945 and 1950, a case can be made that these twilight years of Hollywood’s ascendancy were good years. Within the industry there was concern, of course, about falling receipts—how could there not be?—but there was also a sense that its troubles might be temporary. Good American pictures were still being made, and, individually, many of them continued to prosper.
Elia Kazan’s first movie, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945), is possibly the best movie we have had about a child growing to maturity (and they are not a few, these films), with a lovely, clear-eyed performance by Peggy Ann Garner, an angry, bitter one by Dorothy McGuire as her mother, and James Dunn winning an Oscar as her feckless, charming, doomed father. It is not a “great” movie, but it is rich in nonsentimental values—in common decency, if you will. Kazan made better, more aspiring movies, but none, I think, more heartfelt. And none that, at some simple, uncomplicated level, affects the viewer more directly.
This was his high time. He did not much care for Gentleman’s Agreement (1947); it was not a lasting monument to his style, his manner—nor that of his actors. I came to know and like Kazan—and to write a book and make a film about him—and I came to believe that for roughly a decade he was the greatest of American directors, a man who had an inimitable way of recording something truthful about American life.
The previously mentioned It’s a Wonderful Life is a sort of faux Kazan. I don’t need to go over its component parts again. Though, as I’ve said, I cannot label it even a very good movie, it is one to contend with, a triumph of sappiness over common sense. More than once I heard Frank Capra say that movies are “lies like truth,” and I think we have to give him that in this case. And perhaps we should recognize that Lionel Barrymore’s banker really i
s the meanest man in this little world, and at least Capra doesn’t let him reform—that’s what the film has in the way of integrity. He is not present at the Christmas tree when everyone and everything comes out all right, as of course we always knew it would. It’s a Wonderful Life represents a peculiarly American form of corruption—the cheerful kind. It is not alone in this respect. But it has an eerie perfection in its field.
If I may, a personal footnote: Around the time of my Capra film, the National Society of Film Critics was in the habit of inviting directors to its monthly meetings for off-the-record conversations about their work. I was serving a term as the group’s chairman. We invited David Lean for such an evening. Not everyone in this crowd liked his work, but I did—Ryan’s Daughter excepted. (This was pretty much the majority opinion of the picture, incidentally.) He gamely showed up, somewhat jet-lagged, and expecting, I think, a gentlemanly exchange. Which was not to be.
The problem was that virtually everyone hated his movie. Attacks on it broadened to assaults on his entire body of work, about which he was vague and evasive. This had happened once before, with John Frankenheimer. But John was a tough guy, perfectly capable of defending himself, and it turned out to be a lively evening. Putting it as pleasantly as possible, Lean was no Frankenheimer. As chairman, I did what I could to lead the conversation to calmer waters—not at all effectively, I’m sorry to say. These supposedly civilized critics turned into a baying pack, led by Pauline Kael, who had always found Lean too genteel for her taste.
Keepers: The Greatest Films of a Moviegoing Lifetime Page 17